Online Marketing Tips: SEO, Paid Search, Social Media and Design

SEO plugins are often something that people take for granted—if one works, they stick with it forever. While this works just fine, many are surprised to discover that there are many more SEO plugins and many different features designed for specific businesses and websites. Below is an extensive list of these plugins and some of the features each can offer.

WordPress SEO Plugins: The Master List

Before delving into the list, it’s important to understand that you can have more than one plugin installed on your SEO WordPress site. Most experts feel that you can have as many installed as you’d like, but just make sure you’re installing the right ones. In other words, don’t install two plugins when there is a plugin out there that will do both. Now back to our list:

The Most Popular

SEO Yoast. This is a free plugin that does wonders for on-site optimization. The plugin is very easy to use, free, and helps teach you about SEO and what you need to improve upon in order to optimize the article. It also makes it easy to write Meta titles and descriptions as well as see a preview of your rich snippets.

All In One SEO Pack. This plugin is also free and works well for those who don’t have much of an understanding of SEO. It’s not as fancy as Yoast, but it still offers the option to add custom HTML to the head tag as well as working with Google Analytics to provide you the best on-site optimization.

SEO Smartlinks. This plugin gives users ideas about what they should link and where they should put that link, so it’s “smart.” It automatically links keywords and phrases in the post with other tags found on the website. However, you don’t want your site to be too optimized, so just use this as a guide.

The Hidden Gems

Disqus Comment System. This is a free plugin that seems to do anything and everything related to commenting. It helps your blog offer threaded comments, indexes all comments, and allows readers and commenters to sign up for a subscription to certain discussions or upload to an RSS feed.

Sharexy. This isn’t a completely necessary plugin, but if you’re into art, you might like these choices. This allows you to choose different sized and shaped buttons for your social networks.

Yet Another Related Posts (by Yoast). Recommending related posts at the bottom of all of your articles is a great way to keep people on your site. This plugin makes it easier than having to constantly go through and update articles that seem relevant to another. It uses an algorithm to find related posts for you and allows you to control how it looks.

Great for Those Who Only Want the Basics

Google Site Verification Plugin. It’s important for companies to remember that verifying your site with Google is a part of SEO (a very important one). This plugin makes it easy.

Broken Link Checker. This is yet another plugin that isn’t about total search optimization, but just focuses on one specific point. This plugin will find any broken links for you so that you can easily update them and avoid any backlast from Google.

SEO Friendly Images. Many bloggers get confused when it comes to optimizing photos, so this plugin makes it easy. Once installed, it automatically updates your images with an ALT and TITLE tag. This helps search engine bots understand what the image entails.

The More Advanced

SEO Rank Reporter. This plugin is all about the competition. You can track your rankings for specific keywords, compare your results with your competition, and even set up alerts so that you when something (whatever you choose) changes in your data. All results can be shown as a graph or exported to CSV.

WP No Category Base. This is a good way to clean up your URL structure. It improves the permalinks of your blog post so that Google doesn’t get you in trouble.

It’s a good idea to briefly go through some of these descriptions and then try out the few tools you think would work best. SEO plugins are usually very easy to install and learn to use, so give a few of them a try before making your choice. The most popular aren’t always the best, and it’s only the adventurous that figure it out.